Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

A few months ago, I set out to test cold showers. Here's what I wrote for my experimental mission statement:

People are raving about what hormetic opponent process magic silver bullet it is to take cold showers. A little research gave supposed benefits of increasing circulation, mood, immunity, fertility, energy, exercise recovery, fat loss, mental alertness, pain and stress tolerance, cold tolerance, and skin and hair health. They're even supposed to stop depression and hair loss and tumors. I'm going to alternate two weeks of cold showers with two weeks of hot showers for the next two months and see what actually happens.

So excepting two days of each condition when traveling, every day for two months I woke up, did a 10-minute workout, immediately took a 7-minute shower, recorded my energy, mood, and shower discomfort, and took an 8-minute Quantified Mind battery. This wouldn't tell me anything about skin health and tumors, but it would get the main thing: does a cold shower begin one's day more vigorously than a hot shower?

Results

There were no observable differences on any Quantified Mind tests, suggesting that the brain does not care about the water temperature.

Nor was there any difference in self-reported energy levels when I pasted the data into Statwing:

But it did seem to make me happier immediately afterward:

That's something, I guess. I don't yet know if it makes up for the apprehension of getting into the shower in the first place. The difficulty and shiver latency of jumping into the cold shower went down as I got toward the end of each two-week period as I got used to it until it wasn't that big a deal.

What I realized from doing this is that seven-minutes is too short for an enjoyable hot shower and way too long for a cold shower. The advantage of the cold shower is that I can do it in under a minute (since I don't use any shower products). The experiment called for normalized shower times, but after it ended, I just started doing long hot showers sometimes and instantaneous cold showers other times. Since it takes three minutes for the water to heat up in this apartment, it's often more convenient to go cold and fast, now that I'm practiced.

Cold showers: slight evidence that they're good, but not magical.

Caveat: I don't think the water in my shower goes as cold as that of the most ravenous cold-shower bloggers.

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Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

Maybe; I have really weird temperature settings. Sleeping and hot showers need to be really hot. Outdoors, I'm almost impervious to cold and heat, but indoors I must be warm. Warrants further study. If there was much variance in my temperature when I'm recording happiness pings, I'd hook up a thermometer and run some stats.

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

I heard that if you stop using shampoo for 4-5 weeks, then your natural hair grease production resets to a much lower level and you don't need it any more. Sure enough, after 5 weeks of no shampoo (and extreme greasiness), some sort of switch flipped and now I can go days without any showering before I build up the same amount of hair oil that I would previously do in half a day after shampooing it.

That was when I had long hair, so I still used conditioner. Now I have short hair and conditioner doesn't matter. Suspecting a similar effect, I tested the effect of bodywash on my skin (using it only on one side of the body) and found only a tiny benefit, so I decided to skip it.

So there went my three shower products. Hot showers work better for reducing grease without products than cold showers do; if I was only doing cold showers, I might either become greasier or flip another grease level switch.

Read Next

It's been almost six months since I published The Motivation Hacker, my book on how to get yourself to want to do what you always wanted to want to do. Here's what surprised me.

Sales (updates: First Year Book Sales, Second Year Book Sales, Fourth Year Book Sales)

I use a site called PredictionBook to compare my private guesses to reality for things like this. It helps me be less overconfident. I took a brutal calibration beating on my predictions for how many copies I'd sell in the first six months:

This was going to be a long sweeping article about how wrong we are when we care about different things: how many megapixels a camera has, how much electricity we use by keeping the lights on, using cell phones on airplanes, and swimming in the water when there's lightning out. But instead of trying to weave all those things together, I'm going to focus on the biggest one.

Water.

This one is near and dear to me, because I am a bad showerer and I got in trouble for it as a kid. I'd wake up on a cold New England morning, snow outside, and tip toe across the cold wood floors.